actuality he points to a platypus. By pushing the world into the mind, we no longer have a standpoint in objective
“actuality,”independent of the minds of Joe and the other people observing the situation. All we can say is something
like“But in the conceptualized worlds of other observers, he points to a platypus.”What is to stop the mfro mall
having different conceptualizations? How can we speak any more of Joe's being mistaken? And why should we care?
Are we there-fore doomed to a radical relativism about knowledge?
A way out comes from recognizing the sequence (26 a, b) not as a disembodied piece of language“out there in the
world,”but as originating fro ma speaker who is co m municating his or her conceptualization of the world. This
conceptualizationincludes thejudgmentthat Joe said something withintentto refer to some entity, and thatthis entity
was a platypus. And now we can ask how the speaker came to this judgment.
The judgment has to be based on the match between two concepts: the descriptive characteristics of the entity in
question and the descriptive characteristics associated with the wordplatypus. How did the speaker acquire these
concepts? The characteristics of the entity Joe names may have come through observation of the reported scene, or
they may have come through hearing someone else's report of such an observation. The characteristics of the kind
platypushaveto comethrough thespeaker's learning theword.This in turn relies on a history of observationof others'
usage (including instruction and demonstration).
I belabor this point because it poses the same difficulty for conceptualis mas (26) itself. How can anyone rely on
someone else's report of an observation, and how can anyone count on others' usage of language? Turned a different
way: if conceptualization is essentially personal, how can we communicate?
This is now getting quite speculative, but I a minclined to think that hu man beings have a need to“tune”their
conceptualizations to those of others—to have a common understanding of the world. Since we cannot read minds,
the only way we can assess our attunement is by judging whether the behavior of others—including what they
say—makes sense. To the extent that all members of a community are effective in acting on this drive, there will be a
tendency for conceptual convergence, including in the use of language.
A learnerfacedwitha communitythathas already converged willsee theproblem oftuning as oneofadaptingoneself
to the community's conceptualization:“This is how things are done.”On the other hand, if the community has not
converged, the learner will be faced with some difficulty sorting out what to do. This is as true of cultural and
technological learning as of language learning.
Of course there are many reasons people's conceptualizations do not converge. People may have access to different
information, due to their different